


Survival of the Fittest

by VolxdoSioda



Series: Whumptober 2019 [10]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Gen, Whumptober Day 10: Unconscious, chimera!Noctis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-21 08:23:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21071864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VolxdoSioda/pseuds/VolxdoSioda
Summary: Noctis shouldn't be alive, but he is.





	Survival of the Fittest

“Noctis? Are you alright?”

“Mmn.” Eyes squeezed tight against the sharp icepick currently digging it’s way through his skull, Noctis does his best to answer his father’s question. He’s half afraid if he opens his mouth he’ll vomit though, so non-word answers will have to suffice. 

Rubbing the spot right beneath and slightly to the right of where his horns protrude from his skull seems to make the pain a little less painful, but he’s been dealing with it for so long now it’s hard to tell. He’d thought maybe it was the reading glasses earlier, so he’d stopped using them, and tried to open one of his other sets of eyes - that had turned out to be a  _ very  _ big mistake. Trying to open any set of eyes other than his main ones was impossible. 

He can hear his father moving towards him. “Do you need me to call medical?”

“Mm-mm.” He tries to open one eye just a sliver, and immediately regrets it as the world seems to spin, and the icepick digs a little deeper. He shuts the eye immediately, and stops rubbing the base of his horns. Bad enough the medical assistants have to deal with him as much as they do. He’s not going to expose them to the Walking Bad Science Disaster without needing to. It’s not an emergency. It’s not like he hasn’t dealt with pain before. He can get over this.

“Noctis. Can you speak?” A cold hand cups his face and  _ oh  _ that feels wonderful. Noctis practically melts into the touch. He’d purr, but he’s sure the vibrations won’t help his head. “Can you open your eyes?”

“Mm-mm.” To both. He tries, and the pain threatens, so he just doesn’t.

“I think we’d best take him to medical,” Clarus softly advises. “Whether he wants to go or not.”

“A good plan. Grab his other side, won’t you? Now my boy, easy does it. One foot - or feet, should you prefer - in front of the other.”

In the end, it does wind up being ‘feet’ he walks with, because his balance suddenly doesn’t want to work anymore than his eyes or mouth does. So he tucks his normal legs up and lets the Arachne limbs come down, the multiple hairs giving him a much clearer picture of the ground beneath him, and much more stability, even if they do take up a little more space. Clarus and Regis stick to his sides, and when he wobbles or sways they stop to let him catch his balance again. 

By the time they make it halfway down the hall, he’s had to call out a long coeurl’s tail to help him keep the balance, and traded multiple Arachne limbs for shorter, sturdier legs of the Sleipnir. And then even those seem to fail him, and Noctis bends forward and lets his spine shift to match something lower to the ground, and then even  _ that  _ fails--

He’s a mess by the time they reach medical. His head is burning, throbbing, the icepick dug in so deep it feels like his brains are seeping out of his ears. He collapses against cold stone, and can’t even find it in him to apologize as assistants gasp and doctors hurry over, and his father and Clarus both try to get him up.

“--octi-- a-- ear me?”

Noctis can’t hear what they’re saying. There’s just a high-pitched whine in his ear now, and the world is spinning even as he’s lying down, and he can’t  _ move-- _

Something is shoved over his head, fitted over his mouth, and one of his arms is jabbed, and something cold begins to flow through his veins. Then multiple hands get under him, and lift, and he’s being carried over to a bed that he’s too big to lie completely in - his tail’s come undone, and he can feel his wings starting to peek through the skin as well. He still can’t move, but he doesn’t want either. He’s so  _ tired. _

He eventually falls unconscious, and is glad when it happens.

X-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

When he comes to, it feels like he’s emerging from a long, restful sleep. The pain in his head is gone, but the weight of his head feels off. He can hear voices, murmured in consideration, close by, and lifts one soft ear to listen.

“--antibiotics seem to be working well. He should make a full recovery with a bit of rest.” That’s Doctor Xelnar, one of the few who don’t flinch when Noctis walks in the room with anything less than a human limb. He’s also been one of the few capable of cracking just what creatures Noctis now has attached to him. “I wouldn’t recommend you let him eat meat for a few days. Plant matter should be fine, provided it’s soft, but avoid fruit. Bland, soft foods would be the way to go, until his skull heals over.”

“Understood.” That’s Ignis. 

“Do you think he knew?” Gladio asks, and there’s a frantic shuffling that probably means Prompto is here too. “What was going on with the horns?”

Horns? Did his horns shed? He cracks open one of the eyes lining the back of his neck, and  _ oh,  _ it’s not that his horns  _ shed,  _ it’s that there’s now a second set, dark brown, behind them. 

Well, that explains the headache. And also his ability to open his eyes, speak or move. But that also means there’s a new species of daemon out there in the wilds now. Fuck.

“Noctis?”

He closes the eye on his neck and opens one of the ones near his temple. Ignis is leaning down over him, eyes wide. “Oh, you  _ are--  _ Doctor, I believe he’s awake.”

“Ah?” Doctor Xelnar walks over, and smiles when he sees Noctis’ eyes opening. “Good, good. How are you feeling? Can you speak?”

“Yeah.” His limbs don’t immediately cooperate, but he manages to himself somewhat upright. “What happened?”

“It appears you had a second set of horns come in, along with several other traits that we still need to identify. We’ve already taken samples, so lab results should come back in about a week or so.” He shines a light into each of Noctis’ eyes, nodding as they all react like they should. “There’s a new row of spines along your back, right between your wings, and new hard plates around your knees and elbows. There’s also a series of protective plates that go the length of your throat now as well. You also have a new serpent along your spine - blue and black, non-hostile. We don’t believe it’s venomous. Can you stand?”

Gladio and Ignis remain at his side as he gets to his human feet. His pants have been cut away in favor of a loose gown, and he hitches that up to look at his legs. Sure enough, there’s a patch of incredibly rough skin around his knees now, a shade darker than his normal skin tone. They’re on his elbows as well, and the skin of his throat feels like sandpaper. 

The horns however, aren’t the antlered ones he’s used but, but rather long, curled ones like he’s seen in Arba. 

“How ridiculous do I look?” he asks Ignis, who is watching him with barely-masked concern. 

“You don’t look ridiculous at all,” Ignis assures him. “If anything, your additions only appear to make you…”

“More threatening,” Gladio finishes. He reaches out, brushing fingers over the curl of the horn in a move Noctis can barely feel. “Least we don’t gotta worry about being jabbed by ‘em.”

“It’s not like I  _ picked  _ Anak horns for my first set. And I certainly didn’t ask for a second.”

“Let’s hope you don’t get a third,” Prompto wishes. “I don’t think you’ve got enough room on that skull of yours for it.”

“There were no signs of new growth when we did x-rays or scans,” Doctor Xelnar assures. “He shouldn’t manifest anything new anytime soon. We’ll keep an eye on the new ones in the meantime, to ensure there’s no infection around the point of entry.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ve already faxed a perscription for pain medication to the nearby pharmacy. You should be able to pick them up today.”

“I’ll do so,” Ignis says. “Noct, are you well enough to head back to your room on your own?”

“Yeah. Thanks Iggy. Sorry for the hassle.”

“No hassle,” Gladio murmurs. “But you gotta ‘pologize to your dad and mine when you get the chance. They thought you were dying.”

“It was ugly dude,” Prompto tells him as Noctis ducks behind the curtain to change back into his clothes. “Your temperature shot up hella high, and no matter what they gave you it didn’t lower it down. One of the assistants kept insisting that you were finally going to your grave.”

“Rude.”

“Yeah well, it made your dad cry. Clarus took him back to his office so he wouldn’t have to watch.”

Noctis makes a mental note to find the name of the assistant, and perhaps use his new horns to throw them out a window.

“Then Doctor Xelnar came in, wanted to know what the hell was going on, and had you taken for X-rays and scans. They found the horns first shot they got, so they got in there, and made incisions big enough for the horns to get through. An hour after that, they were out and fully grown, and your temperature dropped back down to normal.”

“Anyone told Dad I’m not dead?”

“The good doc sent a message ahead, yeah. He hasn’t come back.” Gladio nudges him. “You owe them both a lot of groveling.”

“I’m not the one who said I was going to my grave.”

“Yeah well, after what happened to you, you can’t blame them. You  _ shouldn’t  _ be alive.”

And that’s the miserable, ugly truth. With everything that’s been done to him, his DNA and his genetics, he  _ shouldn’t  _ be. But Noctis shouldn’t have lived through the Marilith either. There have been a lot of  _ shouldn’t have _ s in his life, and he’s lived through them all. He’s a human chimera now, but he’s still sane, still alive, and still going to do his best to take on the role of King one day. And who knows, maybe by then science will have done the impossible and found a way to reverse what was done to him.

In the meantime, all he can do is live. “I’d better go see Dad then. He’s gonna want to cry, and Clarus is probably going to scold me.”

“Nah, he’ll cry too,” Gladio says. “That’s why I said you need to grovel.”

“Then that’s what I’ll do. Throw myself on the ground and beg for their forgiveness.”

“Or you could just say ‘sorry I scared the shit out of you’.”

“Or that.”

He winds up doing a little bit of both in the end; nearly knocked to the ground by his father nearly tackling him, and gripped tightly by both Regis and Clarus as his shirt gets dampened, and Clarus snarls at him  _ you utter little shit, you don’t get to do that, it’s not your time yet, do you hear me?  _ But there’s tear tracks on his face too that speak of pain, and his father refuses to let him go anytime soon, so Noctis sits on the floor and lets himself be held and yelled at like a good chimera son, and is quietly grateful that people still love him as much as they do.

Horns and all.


End file.
